Antecedents of Student Self-Formation in Social Theory and Educational Philosophy: What Do They Tell Us About Structure and Agency?

Abstract

One of the main functions of higher education is ‘subjectification’, the process whereby students emerge as self-determining persons. The contemporary form of subjectification can be understood as the ‘self-formation’ of students. Student self-formation is sustained by, and develops, the will to learn and an epistemically engaged student agency that is autonomous and reflexive. Student self-formation is foregrounded in contemporary societies that rest on socially nested autopoietic individuality. It also has partial antecedents in the educational practices of Confucian self-cultivation in the Chinese civilisational zone, the Greek and Roman work of the self on the self, the Bildung tradition in Germany, and the American pragmatism of John Dewey and others. More contemporary antecedents in political theory, sociology and psychology include Lev Vygotsky, Amartya Sen, Anthony Giddens, Margaret Archer and Michel Foucault. These partly contrary theorisations differ in their ideas of structure and agency and hence the space they make for the self-evolution of students. The chapter reviews these differing partial antecedents. It finds that research on student self-formation is best informed by theorisations in which agency is interactive with structure, but also autonomous and ontologically heterogeneous in relation to structure (e.g. Archer and Foucault), rather than patterned by structure within a structure/agency unity (e.g. Giddens). Focus on agency does not block awareness of the power of structural forces: structure and agency are sometimes but not always in a zero-sum relationship. Unequal student starting points, unequal learning resources, and unequal institutional and policy commitments to subjectification, sharply differentiate the conditions of self-formation. Yet in the face of structural inequalities, it is always self-forming agency that offers the way through.